Individuality, Choice, and Genetic Manipulation

Individuality, Choice, and Genetic Manipulation

Lars Schmeink

Publisher:

Liverpool University Press

DOI:10.5949/liverpool/9781781383766.003.0005

Chapter 5 deals with the personal consequences of a posthuman subjectivity and the task of identity creation. In liquid modernity, risks and threats are becoming ever more global but remain systemic, while at the same time the solutions to these issues is relegated to the individual. The existence of a noticeable gap between society's insistence on individuality, autonomy, and self-assertion and the systemic risks to this claim, caused by a globalized flow of information, technology and politics, is thus the argument of the analysis of the video game BioShock. Science fiction as a genre here allows for the extrapolation and exaggeration of this gap by employing the posthuman as an extreme possibility of human identity creation. The dystopian imagination provides a bleak emphasis of the science-fictional dimension of consequence in terms of this development, by providing an alternative history in which rampant individualism meets an extreme form of consumer society. The human body has become the battleground of liquid modern desires to form and consume identities. Further, the medium uniquely provides the specific ideological commentary on the systemic nature of the illusion of autonomy, especially in liquid modern consumer society.

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